The hyperlink or hypertext link is what makes the World Wide Web a web. A hypertext, “link” is a selectable connection from one word, picture, or information object to another. The most common form of link is the highlighted word or picture that can be selected by the user (with a mouse or in some other fashion), resulting in the immediate delivery and view of another file. The highlighted object is referred to as an anchor. The anchor reference and the object referred to constitute a hyperlink or hypertext link.
For online advertising, the anchor reference is typically a picture that forms what is called a “banner ad.” Content is typically displayed centrally on a web page and ads are displayed peripherally, such as at the top, bottom or side of a web page. As such, ads and content are physically separate. The online advertising industry is finding that, in many cases, it is very effective to integrate advertising closely with content, typically matching the banner ad fields with the content topic, such as advertising bicycles on a web page with content relating to bicycling.
However, present online advertising is suffering from various drawbacks. Many consumers are using free, ad-supported Internet services that display a persistent banner ad window in a location of the service provider's choice, often obscuring, and therefore defeating, the advertising being delivered by the web site being viewed. Other consumers, who are annoyed by banner ads, are increasingly using browsers that incorporate banner-filtering software to prevent ad displays. Additionally, as more consumers access the World Wide Web using devices with smaller displays, such as laptop computers, Internet appliances, palm-size computers, and wireless phones, the graphical links of banner ads are becoming more problematic due to spatial constraints. The advertising spaces are often eliminated by special formatting, such as by palm-formatted pages and WAP-formatted pages.
What would be truly useful in a method for integrating advertising with the content being displayed to avoid conflicts between the ads and the available display area.